Seahawks fans upset by Kaepernick headphone ad

By John Boyle

A lot of Seahawks fans were heated during Seattle's loss to San Francisco, just not for the reasons you might expect. They weren't mad about the calls going against their team (OK, fans were mad about that too), or about the way their team was playing. No, a lot of fans were and still are upset about they way they were portrayed in a new Beats by Dre commercial staring 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

You can watch an extended version of the commercial here:

As you can see, while nothing in the ad explicitly said Seattle or Seahawks, it's clear by the color of the fans' gear, the rainy weather, etc., that the ad is meant to portray Kaepernick facing a hostile crowd in Seattle, then tuning out that noise thanks to his fancy noise-canceling headphones. Plenty of fans probably don't care much about this commercial, others may take pride in it, but plenty are quite upset that the ad portrays them as abusive, aggressive, obscene, and sometimes prone to urinate on buses (0:53 mark). Just check out the comments on this post at SportsRadioKJR.com. Or if you're friends with a lot of Seahawks fans on Facebook or Twitter, you've no doubt been seeing comments on this already.

My thoughts? Well for starters, it appears Beats by Dre put together a very successful commercial, because while riling up some fans, they also have a ton of people talking about their product. And secondly, if that company wanted to illustrate the effectiveness of their product, they could have gone about doing it a better way. The premise of the ad is that Kaepernick is able to tune out the hostile fans and got to his happy place, so to speak, because of his headphones. But if that's the message Beats is trying to get across, why show Kaepernick preparing for a game in Seattle? In two starts at CenturyLink Field, Kaepernick has completed just 50 percent of his passes for 371 yards, one touchdown and four interceptions, and the 49ers have been outscored 71-16 in those games. That's the performance you're selling me, Beats by Dre? I'll pass.

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